WHAT ARE FAST RADIO BURSTS?

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly, making them not only hard to find, but also hard to study.

The mystery stems from the fact it is not known what could produce such a short and sharp burst.

This has led some to speculate they could be anything from stars colliding to artificially created messages.

The first FRB was spotted, or rather 'heard' by radio telescopes, back in 2007.

But it was so temporary and seemingly random that it took years for astronomers to agree it was not a glitch in one of the telescope's instruments.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly, making them not only hard to find, but also hard to study.

The mystery stems from the fact it is not known what could produce such a short and sharp burst.

This has led some to speculate they could be anything from stars colliding to artificially created messages.

'Perhaps the most bizarre explanation for the FRBs is that they were alien transmissions,' said Professor Matthew Bailes from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, who contributed to the new research.

Now researchers from Australian National University have detected three FRBS using the Molonglo radio telescope, near Canberra.

In 2013, scientists realised that the Molonglo telescope's unique architecture could be used to pinpoint FRs because of its enormous focal length.

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Rare and brief bursts of cosmic radio waves have puzzled astronomers since they were first detected nearly 10 years ago. Artist's impression pictured

WHAT CAUSES THE SIGNALS?

'Perhaps the most bizarre explanation for the FRBs is that they were alien transmissions,' said Professor Matthew Bailes from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, who contributed to the new research.

But there are other possibilities.

One alternative is the galaxy's active nucleus, with radio emission coming from jets of material emitted from the region surrounding a supermassive black hole.

The source of the fast radio burst is within 100 light years of the continuous radio emissions from the core of the galaxy, which means they are the same or physically associated with one another.

'Conventional single dish radio telescopes have difficulty establishing that transmissions originate beyond the Earth's atmosphere,' said Dr Chris Flynn from Swinburne University of Technology.

A massive re-engineering effort began, which is now opening a new window on the Universe.

The Molonglo telescope has a huge collecting area of 193,750sq ft (18,000 sq m) and a large field of view (eight square degrees on the sky).

The telescope produces 1000 TB of data every day. In comparison, all of the web pages on Wikipedia use just 5.87 terabytes of storage.

Researchers developed software capable of sifting through this vast information to hunt down FRBS.

Using this software, the researchers pinpointed the likely locations of three FRBs.

'It is very exciting to see the University of Sydney's Molonglo telescope making such important scientific discoveries by partnering with Swinburne's expertise in supercomputing', said Professor Anne Green of the University of Sydney.

The telescope data indicated that all three FBRs originated in outer space, but only one could be localised to an individual galaxy.

'Figuring out where the bursts come from is the key to understanding what makes them,' said Manish Caleb, a PhD student at Australian National University who designed the new software.

'Only one burst has been linked to a specific galaxy.

'We expect Molonglo will do this for many more bursts.'

The research was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.